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years. Of the major print and TV media, I could find only one that made plain the real and reassuring trend in airline safety over the previous years. The second paragraph of the lead story on USA Today’s website soon after the crash read: “The crash was the first fatal accident on a U.S. passenger flight since Aug. 27, 2006, ending the longest period on record without a death.” And in the print edition four days after the crash—when the cable networks were running scare stories about airline safety—USA Today’s lead, front page story appropriately began by reiterating that point, “Before Thursday, airlines had made more than 25 million flights in the United States during the past 2 1/2 years without a passenger being killed.”5

Little evidence has been necessary to keep alive a whole array of specious scares I discussed in the previous chapters. Take road rage. In chapter 1, I selected road rage as a textbook example of an uncommon danger that was grossly overblown and that misdirected attention from more structural problems. Its appeal to fear-mongering journalists lay in its presumed randomness: anytime, anywhere, anyone could be a victim. Throughout the first decade of the new century, an average of about 100 magazine, newspaper, and television stories a month still featured the scare. To judge by those news stories, the definition of road rage expanded to include everything from honking to running someone over.6

And road rage became a medical malady. “They’re the victims of a newly defined psychiatric disorder,” announced Richard Schlesinger on CBSMorningNews in June 2006. “Intermittent Explosive Disorder is caused by improper functioning of a brain chemical.” Sixteen million Americans may be affected, he warned. “[They] each have an average of 43 attacks in their lifetime. Something to think about when you’re in heavy traffic.”7

Call this the neurologizing of social problems, a common feature of popular discourse in the early twenty-first century. Ignoring societal conditions, this approach looks inward. At the time of the CBS story, nearly 10 million Americans had a round-trip commute of more than two hours, and soaring housing prices had driven people far from city centers to achieve the American dream of owning a home. Slower, more crowded roads, coupled with deficient investments in roads and public transportation, and high gas prices—and later in the decade, collapsing home values and record numbers of foreclosures in outlying areas—pre—dictably produced overheated drivers.

But the news media tended to focus on the besieged individual’s brain rather than the larger society. Rather than talking to experts on, say, telecommuting or transportation infrastructure, journalists quoted those who advise drivers to treat their road rage with Prozac, therapy, or by learning karate so they can be prepared when raging drivers leap from their vehicles and attack.8

E-Fear Redux

Coverage of supposed dangers of the Internet suffered from tunnel vision as well. In a decade when the United States had the highest rates of childhood poverty in the developed world and the lowest rates of spending on social services, American journalists and politicians portrayed cyberspace as the scariest place a child can be, more menacing by far than anything young people face in a non-virtual world. “I’ve covered murders, grisly accidents, airplanes falling out of the sky and, occasionally, dirty politics. But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on MySpace.com,” reporter Catherine Saillant warned in the Los Angeles Times in 2006. After nosing around on daughter Taylor’s MySpace page and finding a bulletin from another girl urging Taylor to add a certain “hott guy” [sic] to her friends list, Saillant hyperventilated, “Loosely translated, the teenage girl was ‘pimping’ a teenage boy ... If Taylor added him to her MySpace ’friends’ list, the tousled-hair teen would be able to look at her website and send messages to her.”9

If in the 1990s